The rails around the decks are loft objects and the rods come from a spline with lathe
modifier. I tried to use not too highly detailed loft and lathe objects, because without that the face number of the scene could increase easily.

I used planes with lattice modifier to make the 6 ledges on the deck..

The making of the masts and sails took the longest time in the modelling process. Of course I'm not talking about the simple sails which are risen by the wind, but, about the sails which are destroyed, tore and bound up. These come from planes distorted by FFD and noise modifiers and modified on vertex level.

The holes on the main sails are object based (I used opacity maps only for the small holes), because I could reach a more realistic look with the small parts of the sails which lean out around the holes. (and the borders of the holes are much sharper in this way, because you have to use very big opacity maps if you want to see sharp holes and it increases very much the rendering time)